The Only Thing Worth Dying For (6 page)

A wall of twelve lockers to his left represented a full-strength ODA, but currently carried only eight names. Amerine, the captain, was from Hawaii; the team sergeant, thirty-nine-year-old Jefferson Donald Davis, or JD, was from Tennessee; the engineer, Victor Bradley, twenty-nine, was from South Dakota; weapons sergeants Mike McElhiney, thirty, Ronnie Raikes, thirty-seven, and Brent Fowler, twenty-seven, were from Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, respectively; the thirty-eight-year-old intelligence sergeant, Gil Magallanes, Mag, was from California; and the communications sergeant, Dan Petithory, thirty-two, was from Massachusetts. After five years with ODA 574, the warrant officer and second-in-command, forty-one-year-old Lloyd Allard, had just been promoted to the company B-team (which oversees the ODAs, the A-teams) under Major Chris Miller, leaving four vacant lockers. If JD and the battalion’s sergeant major couldn’t figure out a way to get ODA 574 more bodies, the team would be severely undermanned.

Desks lined the other three walls, and a large planning table stood in the center of the room. Amerine’s desk, along with those of the second-in-command and the team sergeant, were squeezed into an adjacent office. Amerine had just opened the windows and settled in his chair when Allard walked in.

“Sir,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Came in to clear my head before the shit storm,” said Amerine. “How about you, chief? Shouldn’t you be with your family?”

“I was getting up to speed for my new job. Ran over here to clean my desk out.”

“Well, you’ll be in a good position to keep an eye on us,” said Amerine. “You can make sure we’re operational: We’re short a medic, a junior communications sergeant, a junior engineer, and now a warrant officer since you’re bailing on us.”

“Shit, sir,” Allard said with a grimace. “Don’t make it any harder than it already is.”

“So, what’s going on down the hall? When is Miller coming back from CENTCOM?”

“Should be any day. Big news is Colonel Mulholland is going to be the JSOTF commander for the entire war effort. They’re giving him the ball. Everybody is pumped up to go kill terrorists, but there’s no plan yet. You didn’t hear this from me, but we’ve got a few teams in isolation now, set to do CSAR when we start bombing. Bad news is General Franks seems to be leaning toward a conventional approach.”

“Worked so well for the Soviets,” Amerine said.

The men of ODA 574 assembled in their team room on Monday, September 24, to prepare for a war they knew little about—and might never fight.

With Allard gone, Master Sergeant Jefferson Davis, the team sergeant, was now second-in-command. A proud southerner from a small town in Carter County, Tennessee, where he grew up fishing, camping, and playing football, JD was married, with two children. Nearing forty, he was a veteran NCO and the oldest member of ODA 574. The Kazakhs had called him Gray Wolf because of the gray hair at his temples, and the name had stuck with his own team.

The role of Special Forces team sergeants is often described as a tough “father,” while the team medic acts as the gentler “mother.” As JD was also a trained medic, he was able to shift his personas to fit the situation. His most important duty, however, was to serve as the conduit between Amerine and the NCOs who made up the rest of ODA 574.

To maintain momentum and synchronize their preparations for war, JD would be calling team meetings twice a day. He would also hand out endless “to do” lists that included packing personal gear, taking inventory of team gear, and requesting mission-specific gear; prepping weapons, radios, and optics; attending classes on new equipment; scheduling live-fire exercises; and preparing the men’s families for a long separation.

Over a week and a half of fifteen-hour days, Major Miller had watched the True Believers trying in vain to persuade the powers at CENTCOM that unconventional warfare was the way to go in Afghanistan.

During a break on September 26, Miller and Kelley were in Kelley’s office, watching a television interview that a British reporter in Afghanistan was conducting with a Mujahideen commander of the Northern Alliance. Holding an AK-47 rifle, the fighter stood on a ridgeline overlooking the Shomali Plain and pointed out the Taliban’s front lines. Journalists had invaded Afghanistan before the U.S. military.

“How come,” Kelley said, “it’s this easy for a reporter to go in and have a conversation with the Northern Alliance—within view of enemy positions, no less—and we can’t convince anybody that sending in Green Berets to conduct UW with the Northern Alliance is the best way to fight this thing?”

An hour after the program aired, Kelley was meeting with his boss, SOCCENT commander Admiral Calland, when the admiral was urgently summoned away. Two hours later, Calland returned, looking distressed. “General Franks just got his ass chewed by Rumsfeld,” he said. “What can we do to get some guys in with the Northern Alliance?”

Kelley all but slapped his forehead. For two weeks the True Believers had preached this precise course of action, but it was a news broadcast that finally sold the secretary of defense.

The True Believers requested five days to plan; the Joint Chiefs gave them three. Word got around, and the True Believers were inundated by requests to brief CENTCOM planners on how UW worked. The detailed explanation was confusing to most, so Kelley whittled the plan down to its key elements, testing his CliffsNotes version late one night on a two-star general:

“We’re going to put small teams of Special Forces guys on the ground in Afghanistan. If CENTCOM gives them two broad powers, then all the complicated tribal nuances, shifting allegiances, tactical reality—they will work it out, and they will win.

“One, we need to give the teams the power to make a radio call and bring great death and destruction from the sky. Instantly, 24/7, no matter where they are.

“Two, they need to be able to make a radio call and at the next period of darkness, we have to be able to deliver from the sky shelter, medicine, lots of weapons, munitions, and explosives for guerrilla fighters.

“If we give them those two powers, the Green Berets will make it happen on the ground.”

On September 30, the True Believers briefed General Tommy Franks in his CENTCOM office, spelling out the advantages and disadvantages of four potential courses of action for conducting UW in Afghanistan.
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Franks ultimately chose the True Believers’ recommendation, to begin in the north and ally with the Northern Alliance, which was already fighting the Taliban, despite the potential for civil war if the Northern Alliance took power.

“You talked to me in terms I can understand,” said Franks. “Okay, do it.”

On the morning of October 5, Amerine walked to the end of the hall, where the B-team was headquartered, and found Lloyd Allard talking with the company commander, Chris Miller.

“Must be strange to see how the country changed while you were gone,” Miller said as they shook hands.

“It’s like a police state at the airports,” Amerine said. “And one-hour waits just to get into Campbell. Tell me you have some good news.”

“First of all, you probably heard that I volunteered Mulholland to command the JSOTF. I had no idea what a shit sandwich that job is. Mulholland tried to bow out gracefully, but Admiral Calland wouldn’t budge. He flicked the booger on Mulholland and now he’s stuck with it.”

“Mulholland’s leaving tomorrow,” Allard added. “His staff is saying he’s overtasked.”

“That’s an understatement,” said Miller. “Fifth Group doesn’t have the personnel, the equipment, or the background to stand up a JSOTF, and Calland, who should be running the show, is giving jack shit for support or guidance. It’s a mess, but Mulholland will figure it out. He’s a Green Beret.”

“About that good news?” Amerine said.

“Oh, I don’t want to spoil the surprise,” Miller said, waving him off. “I’m going to get the company together in a little while.”

The Alpha Company Green Berets had lined up along the walls outside their team rooms, and now Miller walked purposefully from his office to the middle of the hallway, nodding at his men as he went. Usually, Miller would ease into meetings with small talk, but today he got right to his announcement.

“All right!” he boomed. “I just got off the phone with SOCCENT. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have approved the war plan in Afghanistan. Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind: Everyone here is going to war.” He held up his hand to stifle the beginning of a cheer. “You might not be going today, you might not be going tomorrow, but we’re going to be moving out of here. Every single person in this company is going to do what they get paid to do, and it’s coming soon!”

Pulling a scrap of paper from his pocket, Miller said, “Now I give you Rudyard Kipling. He spent a fair amount of time in the region we’ll be operating in and reminds us that if there is a time to be at our very best, that time is now. Because if you fuck up and,” he read,

…you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

There was a roar of laughter.

ODA 574’s senior weapons sergeant, Mike McElhiney, turned to Kevin Moorhead, his hunting buddy from another team, and said, “Looks like we’re not going hunting this year.”

“Yes we are,” responded Moorhead. “We’ll be hunting for man.”

That afternoon saw two new faces at ODA 574’s standard end-of-day meeting.

Sergeant First Class Wes McGirr was a twenty-five-year-old Californian with intense eyes but a laid-back attitude, who introduced himself and explained that his former team, ODA 582, had just been “ghosted”—temporarily disbanded because too many positions were vacant. Its members and equipment had been shuffled around to fill the needs of the other teams in the battalion. “It’s good to be here,” he said with the brevity of a good communications sergeant. “I’m ready to go to work.”

A native of Tennessee, Sergeant First Class Ken Gibson was in his mid-forties, Amerine guessed, and out of shape: The medic didn’t look as if he belonged in the Army, let alone the Special Forces.

“I know I’m fat,” Ken said by way of introduction, “but I promise I can keep up with you guys. I really want to go on this deployment—and I’m good at my job.”

Amerine thought Ken, who had been sent over from 3rd Special Forces Group to fill a medic slot at 5th Group, conveyed an air of superiority as he gave his teammates an overview of his background—he was a Gulf War veteran with extensive medical skills—but his attitude also suggested that he probably
was
good at his job. Even though any Green Beret medic who had been at it as long as Ken had to be competent, Amerine still sensed that the man was “ROAD,” a pejorative acronym for Retired on Active Duty.

After the meeting, Dan took Wes out for a beer, telling Amerine the following morning that the new junior communications sergeant was “gonna work out just fine. But I keep thinking about the medic. I’ve got a major problem with him.”

“What’s that?” asked Amerine.

“He’s not Cubby.”

Thirty-two-year-old Sergeant First Class Tim “Cubby” Wojciehowski had been ODA 574’s medic since 1996. While the team was in Kazakhstan, Cubby had been attending the Advanced Noncommissioned Officer Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where, after 9/11, he, like many Special Forces NCOs, was checking off career boxes. To his frustration, he was ordered to complete the course rather than rejoin his team. ODA 574 was family to Cubby; Dan had been both his roommate and best friend on the team.

“We’ll miss Cubby,” said Amerine. “But we have to be thankful we got a medic at all. They’re in short supply.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Dan. “But it still doesn’t feel right going to war without him.”

On October 7, 2001, the United States sent fifteen land-based bombers and twenty-five carrier-based fighter bombers to attack Taliban targets in northern and southern Afghanistan. U.S. ships and British submarines in the Arabian Sea launched fifty Tomahawk missiles, targeting Taliban compounds, command centers, and airfields. In the first hours of Operation Enduring Freedom, the small—forty combat aircraft—Taliban air force was destroyed, along with its supply of anti-aircraft surface-to-air missiles.
⁶
This offensive kicked off the air campaign, with bombing raids continuing both day and night.

Two days later, Miller and his B-team staff, including Lloyd Allard, were in the Alpha Company command office watching the morning Department of Defense briefing on television when a reporter asked Secretary Rumsfeld to verify the rumor that pilots flying the bombing missions were running out of targets.

“We’re not running out of targets,” Rumsfeld said. “Afghanistan is.”

The remark that drew laughter from the crowd at the press conference reminded Miller of Kelley’s prediction: CENTCOM would quickly run out of targets. “The enemy is not stupid,” Kelley had told Miller. “Once the bombing starts, we’ll take out their air defenses in short order, then the Taliban will hole up in caves. We need small teams of Green Berets teamed up with the Northern Alliance, and together they will assault Taliban positions, driving them out of their caves and making them vulnerable to airpower. Without men on the ground, we’ll be pounding sand.”

The men in Miller’s Alpha Company command office began to discuss an e-mail being forwarded around 5th Group, written by a pilot who had been ordered to rebomb targets that had already been destroyed. “This is such bullshit,” he wrote. “If the rubble of two walls forms a 90-degree angle on imagery, my orders are to drop a precision-guided munition on it.”

“You won’t see that quote on the news,” said Allard as Major Kurt Sonntag entered the room.

Sonntag had two announcements. First, Lieutenant Colonel Queeg, their battalion commander, had deployed forward with Colonel Mulholland, so Sonntag was now in charge of 3rd Battalion. Then he said, “The battalion is isolating. Tell your teams to say good-bye to their families and report to the ISOFAC
*
on Sunday.”